OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Attention-guided Feature Distillation for Semantic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Deep learning models have achieved significant results across various computer vision tasks. However, due to the large number of parameters in these models, deploying them in real-time scenarios is a critical challenge, specifically in dense prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation. Knowledge distillation has emerged as a successful technique for addressing this problem by transferring knowledge from a cumbersome model (teacher) to a lighter model (student). In contrast to existing complex methodologies commonly employed for distilling knowledge from a teacher to a student, this paper showcases the efficacy of a simple yet powerful method for utilizing refined feature maps to transfer attention. The proposed method has proven to be effective in distilling rich information, outperforming existing methods in semantic segmentation as a dense prediction task. The proposed Attention-guided Feature Distillation (AttnFD) method, employs the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), which refines feature maps by taking into account both channel-specific and spatial information content. Simply using the Mean Squared Error (MSE) loss function between the refined feature maps of the teacher and the student, AttnFD demonstrates outstanding performance in semantic segmentation, achieving state-of-the-art results in terms of improving the mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of the student network on the PascalVoc 2012, Cityscapes, COCO, and CamVid datasets.
Can Interpretability Layouts Influence Human Perception of Offensive Sentences?
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

This paper conducts a user study to assess whether three machine learning (ML) interpretability layouts can influence participants' views when evaluating sentences containing hate speech, focusing on the "Misogyny" and "Racism" classes. Given the existence of divergent conclusions in the literature, we provide empirical evidence on using ML interpretability in online communities through statistical and qualitative analyses of questionnaire responses. The Generalized Additive Model estimates participants' ratings, incorporating within-subject and between-subject designs. While our statistical analysis indicates that none of the interpretability layouts significantly influences participants' views, our qualitative analysis demonstrates the advantages of ML interpretability: 1) triggering participants to provide corrective feedback in case of discrepancies between their views and the model, and 2) providing insights to evaluate a model's behavior beyond traditional performance metrics.
TokenMark: A Modality-Agnostic Watermark for Pre-trained Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Watermarking is a critical tool for model ownership verification. However, existing watermarking techniques are often designed for specific data modalities and downstream tasks, without considering the inherent architectural properties of the model. This lack of generality and robustness underscores the need for a more versatile watermarking approach. In this work, we investigate the properties of Transformer models and propose TokenMark, a modality-agnostic, robust watermarking system for pre-trained models, leveraging the permutation equivariance property. TokenMark embeds the watermark by fine-tuning the pre-trained model on a set of specifically permuted data samples, resulting in a watermarked model that contains two distinct sets of weights -- one for normal functionality and the other for watermark extraction, the latter triggered only by permuted inputs. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art pre-trained models demonstrate that TokenMark significantly improves the robustness, efficiency, and universality of model watermarking, highlighting its potential as a unified watermarking solution.
Model-Predictive Trajectory Generation for Aerial Search and Coverage
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

This paper introduces a trajectory planning algorithm for search and coverage missions with an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) based on an uncertainty map that represents prior knowledge of the target region, modeled by a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). The trajectory planning problem is formulated as an Optimal Control Problem (OCP), which aims to maximize the uncertainty reduction within a specified mission duration. However, this results in an intractable OCP whose objective functional cannot be expressed in closed form. To address this, we propose a Model Predictive Control (MPC) algorithm based on a relaxed formulation of the objective function to approximate the optimal solutions. This relaxation promotes efficient map exploration by penalizing overlaps in the UAV's visibility regions along the trajectory. The algorithm can produce efficient and smooth trajectories, and it can be efficiently implemented using standard Nonlinear Programming solvers, being suitable for real-time planning. Unlike traditional methods, which often rely on discretizing the mission space and using complex mixed-integer formulations, our approach is computationally efficient and easier to implement. The MPC algorithm is initially assessed in MATLAB, followed by Gazebo simulations and actual experimental tests conducted in an outdoor environment. The results demonstrate that the proposed strategy can generate efficient and smooth trajectories for search and coverage missions.
When No-Reference Image Quality Models Meet MAP Estimation in Diffusion Latents
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Contemporary no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) models can effectively quantify perceived image quality, often achieving strong correlations with human perceptual scores on standard IQA benchmarks. Yet, limited efforts have been devoted to treating NR-IQA models as natural image priors for real-world image enhancement, and consequently comparing them from a perceptual optimization standpoint. In this work, we show -- for the first time -- that NR-IQA models can be plugged into the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation framework for image enhancement. This is achieved by performing gradient ascent in the diffusion latent space rather than in the raw pixel domain, leveraging a pretrained differentiable and bijective diffusion process. Likely, different NR-IQA models lead to different enhanced outputs, which in turn provides a new computational means of comparing them. Unlike conventional correlation-based measures, our comparison method offers complementary insights into the respective strengths and weaknesses of the competing NR-IQA models in perceptual optimization scenarios. Additionally, we aim to improve the best-performing NR-IQA model in diffusion latent MAP estimation by incorporating the advantages of other top-performing methods. The resulting model delivers noticeably better results in enhancing real-world images afflicted by unknown and complex distortions, all preserving a high degree of image fidelity.
Tactical Decision Making for Autonomous Trucks by Deep Reinforcement Learning with Total Cost of Operation Based Reward
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

We develop a deep reinforcement learning framework for tactical decision making in an autonomous truck, specifically for Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) and lane change maneuvers in a highway scenario. Our results demonstrate that it is beneficial to separate high-level decision-making processes and low-level control actions between the reinforcement learning agent and the low-level controllers based on physical models. In the following, we study optimizing the performance with a realistic and multi-objective reward function based on Total Cost of Operation (TCOP) of the truck using different approaches; by adding weights to reward components, by normalizing the reward components and by using curriculum learning techniques.
ContextGPT: Infusing LLMs Knowledge into Neuro-Symbolic Activity Recognition Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Context-aware Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is a hot research area in mobile computing, and the most effective solutions in the literature are based on supervised deep learning models. However, the actual deployment of these systems is limited by the scarcity of labeled data that is required for training. Neuro-Symbolic AI (NeSy) provides an interesting research direction to mitigate this issue, by infusing common-sense knowledge about human activities and the contexts in which they can be performed into HAR deep learning classifiers. Existing NeSy methods for context-aware HAR rely on knowledge encoded in logic-based models (e.g., ontologies) whose design, implementation, and maintenance to capture new activities and contexts require significant human engineering efforts, technical knowledge, and domain expertise. Recent works show that pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) effectively encode common-sense knowledge about human activities. In this work, we propose ContextGPT: a novel prompt engineering approach to retrieve from LLMs common-sense knowledge about the relationship between human activities and the context in which they are performed. Unlike ontologies, ContextGPT requires limited human effort and expertise. An extensive evaluation carried out on two public datasets shows how a NeSy model obtained by infusing common-sense knowledge from ContextGPT is effective in data scarcity scenarios, leading to similar (and sometimes better) recognition rates than logic-based approaches with a fraction of the effort.
NeuPAN: Direct Point Robot Navigation with End-to-End Model-based Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Navigating a nonholonomic robot in a cluttered, unknown environment requires accurate perception and precise motion control for real-time collision avoidance. This paper presents NeuPAN: a real-time, highly accurate, map-free, easy-to-deploy, and environment-invariant robot motion planner. Leveraging a tightly coupled perception-to-control framework, NeuPAN has two key innovations compared to existing approaches: 1) it directly maps raw point cloud data to a latent distance feature space for collision-free motion generation, avoiding error propagation from the perception to control pipeline; 2) it is interpretable from an end-to-end model-based learning perspective. The crux of NeuPAN is solving an end-to-end mathematical model with numerous point-level constraints using a plug-and-play (PnP) proximal alternating-minimization network (PAN), incorporating neurons in the loop. This allows NeuPAN to generate real-time, physically interpretable motions. It seamlessly integrates data and knowledge engines, and its network parameters can be fine-tuned via backpropagation. We evaluate NeuPAN on a ground mobile robot, a wheel-legged robot, and an autonomous vehicle, in extensive simulated and real-world environments. Results demonstrate that NeuPAN outperforms existing baselines in terms of accuracy, efficiency, robustness, and generalization capabilities across various environments, including the cluttered sandbox, office, corridor, and parking lot. We show that NeuPAN works well in unknown and unstructured environments with arbitrarily shaped objects, transforming impassable paths into passable ones.
Uncertainty in Graph Neural Networks: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been extensively used in various real-world applications. However, the predictive uncertainty of GNNs stemming from diverse sources such as inherent randomness in data and model training errors can lead to unstable and erroneous predictions. Therefore, identifying, quantifying, and utilizing uncertainty are essential to enhance the performance of the model for the downstream tasks as well as the reliability of the GNN predictions. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the GNNs from the perspective of uncertainty with an emphasis on its integration in graph learning. We compare and summarize existing graph uncertainty theory and methods, alongside the corresponding downstream tasks. Thereby, we bridge the gap between theory and practice, meanwhile connecting different GNN communities. Moreover, our work provides valuable insights into promising directions in this field.
Towards Full Automation of Geometry Extraction for Biomechanical Analysis of Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm; Neural Network-Based versus Classical Methodologies
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2025
Year: 2025

Background: For the clinical adoption of stress-based rupture risk estimation in abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAAs), a fully automated pipeline, from clinical imaging to biomechanical stress computation, is essential. To this end, we investigated the impact of AI-based image segmentation methods on stress computation results in the walls of AAAs. We compared wall stress distributions and magnitudes calculated from geometry models obtained from classical semi-automated segmentation versus automated neural network-based segmentation. Method: 16 different AAA contrast-enhanced computed tomography (CT) images were semi-automatically segmented by an analyst, taking between 15 and 40 minutes of human effort per patient, depending on image quality. The same images were automatically segmented using PRAEVAorta2 commercial software by NUREA (https://www.nurea-soft.com/), developed based on artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, and automatically post-processed with an in-house MATLAB code, requiring only 1-2 minutes of computer time per patient. Aneurysm wall stress calculations were automatically performed using the BioPARR software (https://bioparr.mech.uwa.edu.au/). Results: Compared to the classical semi-automated segmentation, the automatic neural network-based segmentation leads to equivalent stress distributions, and slightly higher peak and 99th percentile maximum principal stress values. However, our statistical analysis indicated that the differences in AAA wall stress obtained using the two segmentation methods are not statistically significant and fall well within the typical range of inter-analyst and intra-analyst variability. Conclusions: Our findings are a steppingstone toward a fully automated pipeline for biomechanical analysis of AAAs, starting with CT scans and concluding with wall stress assessment.
Knowledge Graph Large Language Model (KG-LLM) for Link Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

The task of multi-hop link prediction within knowledge graphs (KGs) stands as a challenge in the field of knowledge graph analysis, as it requires the model to reason through and understand all intermediate connections before making a prediction. In this paper, we introduce the Knowledge Graph Large Language Model (KG-LLM), a novel framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) for knowledge graph tasks. We first convert structured knowledge graph data into natural language and then use these natural language prompts to fine-tune LLMs to enhance multi-hop link prediction in KGs. By converting the KG to natural language prompts, our framework is designed to learn the latent representations of entities and their interrelations. To show the efficacy of the KG-LLM Framework, we fine-tune three leading LLMs within this framework, including Flan-T5, LLaMa2 and Gemma. Further, we explore the framework's potential to provide LLMs with zero-shot capabilities for handling previously unseen prompts. Experimental results show that KG-LLM significantly improves the models' generalization capabilities, leading to more accurate predictions in unfamiliar scenarios.
A bargain for mergesorts -- How to prove your mergesort correct and stable, almost for free
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2025
Year: 2025

We present a novel characterization of stable mergesort functions using relational parametricity, and show that it implies the functional correctness of mergesort. As a result, one can prove the correctness of several variations of mergesort (e.g., top-down, bottom-up, tail-recursive, non-tail-recursive, smooth, and non-smooth mergesorts) by proving the characteristic property for each variation. Thanks to our characterization and the parametricity translation, we deduced the correctness results, including stability, of various implementations of mergesort for lists, including highly optimized ones, in the Rocq Prover (formerly the Coq Proof Assistant).
VIGFace: Virtual Identity Generation for Privacy-Free Face Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Deep learning-based face recognition continues to face challenges due to its reliance on huge datasets obtained from web crawling, which can be costly to gather and raise significant real-world privacy concerns. To address this issue, we propose VIGFace, a novel framework capable of generating synthetic facial images. Our idea originates from pre-assigning virtual identities in the feature space. Initially, we train the face recognition model using a real face dataset and create a feature space for both real and virtual identities, where virtual prototypes are orthogonal to other prototypes. Subsequently, we train the diffusion model based on the established feature space, enabling it to generate authentic human face images from real prototypes and synthesize virtual face images from virtual prototypes. Our proposed framework provides two significant benefits. Firstly, it shows clear separability between existing individuals and virtual face images, allowing one to create synthetic images with confidence and without concerns about privacy and portrait rights. Secondly, it ensures improved performance through data augmentation by incorporating real existing images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our virtual face dataset and framework, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art on various face recognition benchmarks.
Offboard Occupancy Refinement with Hybrid Propagation for Autonomous Driving
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Vision-based occupancy prediction, also known as 3D Semantic Scene Completion (SSC), presents a significant challenge in computer vision. Previous methods, confined to onboard processing, struggle with simultaneous geometric and semantic estimation, continuity across varying viewpoints, and single-view occlusion. Our paper introduces OccFiner, a novel offboard framework designed to enhance the accuracy of vision-based occupancy predictions. OccFiner operates in two hybrid phases: 1) a multi-to-multi local propagation network that implicitly aligns and processes multiple local frames for correcting onboard model errors and consistently enhancing occupancy accuracy across all distances. 2) the region-centric global propagation, focuses on refining labels using explicit multi-view geometry and integrating sensor bias, particularly for increasing the accuracy of distant occupied voxels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OccFiner improves both geometric and semantic accuracy across various types of coarse occupancy, setting a new state-of-the-art performance on the SemanticKITTI dataset. Notably, OccFiner significantly boosts the performance of vision-based SSC models, achieving accuracy levels competitive with established LiDAR-based onboard SSC methods. Furthermore, OccFiner is the first to achieve automatic annotation of SSC in a purely vision-based approach. Quantitative experiments prove that OccFiner successfully facilitates occupancy data loop-closure in autonomous driving. Additionally, we quantitatively and qualitatively validate the superiority of the offboard approach on city-level SSC static maps. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/MasterHow/OccFiner.
TeaMs-RL: Teaching LLMs to Generate Better Instruction Datasets via Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

The development of Large Language Models (LLMs) often confronts challenges stemming from the heavy reliance on human annotators in the reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) framework, or the frequent and costly external queries tied to the self-instruct paradigm. In this work, we pivot to Reinforcement Learning (RL) -- but with a twist. Diverging from the typical RLHF, which refines LLMs following instruction data training, we use RL to directly generate the foundational instruction dataset that alone suffices for fine-tuning. Our method, TeaMs-RL, uses a suite of textual operations and rules, prioritizing the diversification of training datasets. It facilitates the generation of high-quality data without excessive reliance on external advanced models, paving the way for a single fine-tuning step and negating the need for subsequent RLHF stages. Our findings highlight key advantages of our approach: reduced need for human involvement and fewer model queries (only 5.73% of the strong baseline's total), along with enhanced capabilities of LLMs in crafting and comprehending complex instructions compared to strong baselines, and substantially improved model privacy protection. Code is available at the link: https://github.com/SafeRL-Lab/TeaMs-RL
Liquid Resistance Liquid Capacitance Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2025
Year: 2025

We introduce liquid-resistance liquid-capacitance neural networks (LRCs), a neural-ODE model which considerably improve the generalization, accuracy, and biological plausibility of electrical equivalent circuits (EECs), liquid time-constant networks (LTCs), and saturated liquid time-constant networks (STCs), respectively. We also introduce LRC units (LRCUs), as a very efficient and accurate gated RNN-model, which results from solving LRCs with an explicit Euler scheme using just one unfolding. We empirically show and formally prove that the liquid capacitance of LRCs considerably dampens the oscillations of LTCs and STCs, while at the same time dramatically increasing accuracy even for cheap solvers. We experimentally demonstrate that LRCs are a highly competitive alternative to popular neural ODEs and gated RNNs in terms of accuracy, efficiency, and interpretability, on classic time-series benchmarks and a complex autonomous-driving lane-keeping task.
People Attribute Purpose to Autonomous Vehicles When Explaining Their Behavior: Insights from Cognitive Science for Explainable AI
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

It is often argued that effective human-centered explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) should resemble human reasoning. However, empirical investigations of how concepts from cognitive science can aid the design of XAI are lacking. Based on insights from cognitive science, we propose a framework of explanatory modes to analyze how people frame explanations, whether mechanistic, teleological, or counterfactual. Using the complex safety-critical domain of autonomous driving, we conduct an experiment consisting of two studies on (i) how people explain the behavior of a vehicle in 14 unique scenarios (N1=54) and (ii) how they perceive these explanations (N2=382), curating the novel Human Explanations for Autonomous Driving Decisions (HEADD) dataset. Our main finding is that participants deem teleological explanations significantly better quality than counterfactual ones, with perceived teleology being the best predictor of perceived quality. Based on our results, we argue that explanatory modes are an important axis of analysis when designing and evaluating XAI and highlight the need for a principled and empirically grounded understanding of the cognitive mechanisms of explanation. The HEADD dataset and our code are available at: https://datashare.ed.ac.uk/handle/10283/8930.